Replies

“Here’s how the media is misreporting COVID-19’s death toll in America”

From October 17 2020

Excerpt:

News
Metro
Page Six
Sports
Business
Opinion
Entertainment
Fashion
NY Post Shopping
Living
Media
Tech
Real Estate
Video
Photos
Covers
Columnists
Horoscopes
Sports Odds
Podcasts
Email Newsletters
Store
Home Delivery
New York Post
CloseBREAKING NEWS’A-Train Ripper’ identified as homeless man from Brooklyn
OPINION
Facebook
Twitter
Flipboard
WhatsApp
Email
Copy
Here’s how the media is misreporting COVID-19’s death toll in America
By Jay W. Richards, Douglas Axe and William BriggsOctober 17, 2020 | 12:36pm | Updated
As the coronavirus pandemic drags on, fewer people are dying and more people are recovering with few or no problems. But you won’t read this in the mainstream press.
As the coronavirus pandemic drags on, fewer people are dying and more people are recovering with few or no problems. But you won’t read this in the mainstream press.NY Post photo composite
Sign up for our special edition newsletter to get a daily update on the coronavirus pandemic.

On Sept. 22, CNN triumphantly announced that 200,000 people had died from COVID-19 in the United States.

CNN tried various ways of rubbing in the 200,000 figure. Their best effort was an infographic blaring, “US COVID-19 deaths are equal to having the 9/11 attacks every day for 66 days.”

Here’s a less biased, but less catchy, comparison: 2020’s attributed COVID-19 deaths were equivalent to having another 2017-2018 flu and pneumonia season boosted by 13 percent.

The CDC estimated that about 177,000 Americans died during the 2017-2018 flu season, from either the flu itself or by complications of pneumonia. (The CDC never made a public announcement about this number, but you can count it yourself from data on its site, as I did in the chart below.) That was a bad year, noted at the time, but mostly by medical professionals. Those with good memories will recall seeing more “Wash Your Hands” and “Cough Into Your Elbows” posters.

MORE ON:
CORONAVIRUS
UK joins US in demanding China release early COVID data
Fauci: Not all teachers need to be vaccinated to open schools
CDC boss: ‘Absolutely’ too early for states to lift mask mandates
One family tests positive for COVID-19, so New Zealand put largest city into lockdown
Still, nobody remembers a panic. Just as nobody remembers mask mandates or political leaders shutting down small businesses and locking the healthy in their homes. Because, of course, none of that happened. (This lack of panics during past pandemics is detailed in our book, “The Price of Panic: How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic into a Catastrophe.”)

On the same day as CNN’s announcement, the CDC officially posted a total 187,072 deaths attributed in some way to COVID-19. Deaths were boosted to a hair under 300,000 after adding in pneumonia and flu.

This is the more important number, since it captures the disease burden better than CNN’s. Even so, it’s not clear how many deaths were caused by the coronavirus alone, how many died with but not simply from infection by the coronavirus, and how many died of other things but just happened to be infected around the time of death.

View this document on Scribd
The CDC itself caused a stir at the end of August by estimating that the virus directly caused only 6 percent, or now just over 11,000 of the 187,000 attributed deaths. Most of these deaths were in the elderly.

The remaining 94 percent died with and not exclusively of the coronavirus. These people also were on average elderly and had 2.6 other health problems. This implies a good fraction who succumbed had three or more comorbidities. In other words, most deaths attributed to the coronavirus were in very sick people.

Unfortunately, tests for the presence of the bug are prone to false positives. This is when the test says somebody has a current infection when they don’t. The test can mistake past infections as current, or even tag infections of other coronaviruses. The one causing COVID-19 is only one among many.

Even a tiny false-positive rate at this level is a problem. Take the 1 percent false-positive rate, cited by some. If 5 percent of the public has the disease at one time, a million tests will produce 9,500 false “new cases.”

https://nypost.com/2020/10/17/how-the-media-is-misreporting-covid-19s-death-toll-in-america/